Constance. Rosie Thomas
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A few people were on their way to or from prayer, women with baskets of fruit balanced on padded headpieces and men in the obligatory sarongs and bright sashes. Those who were returning had flowers behind their ears and grains of rice pressed to their cheeks, and their hair was beaded with moisture from splashing with tirta, holy water.
Monkeys prowled along the temple walls and sat in rows on the steps, picking fleas from one another’s backs. Several of them bit into the hijacked bananas. They were macaques with black-faced babies clinging to their fur. Connie noticed with sudden dismay that instead of a monkey baby, one male had a tiny, bedraggled ginger kitten. He detached the little creature from his chest and flipped it over the back of his hand like a set of worry beads. Then he tossed it in the dust at his feet, yawning as he poked at it with his prehensile fingers. The kitten gave out almost soundless mews of distress when the macaque upended it and delicately scratched its pale-pink belly with black hooked fingernails. But when the monkey withdrew its hand the kitten righted itself and crawled back towards its tormentor, searching for protection.
The temples had colonies of wild cats as well as monkeys. Connie stared around her, wanting to rescue the little creature and restore it to its proper mother. But if she tried to swoop in and snatch it away the monkeys would certainly attack her. The tourists were right about that; they did bite. The monkey picked up the kitten again, perhaps in response to its mewing, and tucked it against his chest. It glared at Connie and the kitten hung on like the other babies, blinking its pale gummed-up eyes at the world.
Connie walked on. Trying to get the little scene out of her mind, she told herself that without its mother’s milk the kitten wouldn’t have to suffer for very much longer. The back of her neck and her shirt where the packet of rice pressed against it were clammy with sweat.
The path out of the forest crossed a small gorge by way of a plank suspension bridge, the metalwork crusted with decades-worth of wood-pigeon droppings. The planks creaked and swayed under her feet and she broke into a laden dash for the safety of the opposite side, stepping onto solid ground again and then laughing at her moment of panic.
Out here was the real village. Tourists never penetrated this far from the centre and there were no coffee shops or galleries. A sprawl of smallholdings and palm-thatch houses were separated by rank ditches clogged with refuse. Connie ducked under the silver filaments of a spider’s web and noted the impressive size of the tortoiseshell-mottled spider gently swaying at the centre. She stepped over another ditch and made her way up to Pema’s family house. Today it was distinguished from the others by penjors, tall bamboo poles with curled bark and flags to denote a special occasion.
There was no one sitting on the frayed rattan chairs drawn up against the wall, only a line of washing suspended between two palm trunks. Underneath the laundry a row of woven bamboo cages the size and shape of large bell jars each housed a dusty brown hen. The dried mud around the cages was starred with the prints of chickens’ feet and speckled with scattered corn.
Connie tapped on the door jamb. After a moment a woman bobbed up out of the dimness of the interior. She was big, wearing a pink blouse and a faded sarong. Connie recognised Pema’s mother. She placed the flowers and rice on the nearest chair, pressed the palms of her hands together and bowed over her fingertips before murmuring the expected greeting and congratulations.
Pema’s mother returned the salute.
Connie handed over the traditional gifts, flowers for fertility and rice for prosperity.
‘Thank you. Please come inside.’
Connie left her sandals in the row beside the door and went in barefoot. A small fan churned the air, but the room was still stuffy and as hot as a furnace. It seemed to be crowded with people, most of whom were pressed between the two weaving looms that occupied two-thirds of the floor space. A very old woman, perhaps Pema’s grandmother, sat at the bench in front of one of the looms. Her brown hands rested on the unfinished length of ikat cloth, and she was so small that her feet dangled six inches short of the treadles.
Everyone bowed to Connie and she returned the salutes, working from the oldest down to whoever appeared to be the youngest. One of the teenaged girls, a sister, held a baby of a few months, a round-faced infant with the heavy-lidded stare of a miniature deity.
Dewi lay propped up on cushions on a wooden divan. She held a swaddled bundle in her arms. Two or three years back, Connie remembered, she had been hardly more than a little girl, and even now she looked far too young to be a mother. There were purple rings of fatigue around her eyes but her small, even white teeth showed in a broad grin of pride as Connie stooped beside her.
‘Well done,’ Connie smiled.
Before her marriage Dewi had often come over to Connie’s house to drink Cokes or make herself imaginative snacks from the sparse contents of Connie’s fridge, and to giggle over Western magazines. She had a good voice, and loved to sing or la-la the lyrics of pop songs while Connie sat at her keyboard playing the melody and joining in the choruses.
Pema’s mother asked if Connie would care to drink a glass of green tea, and Connie politely accepted. There was a stir of large bodies in the crowded room.
‘Would you like to hold him?’ Dewi whispered.
‘Yes, please.’
Dewi handed the tiny bundle into Connie’s arms. It weighed almost nothing. She looked down into the baby’s sleeping face. One purple-grey fist was bunched against his cheek, and two tiny commas of damp black eyelashes punctuated the wrinkled mask. He looked premature, and also prehistorically ancient. Connie’s throat tightened.
‘What’s his name?’
‘Wayan.’
Wayan or Putu for the firstborn of Balinese families, depending on caste; Kadek or Madé for the second; Komang or Nyoman for the third and Ketut for number four, then back to Wayan again. That was how it went. No fanciful baby names, even for a girl who pored over second-hand celebrity magazines as eagerly as Dewi did.
‘He’s beautiful,’ Connie told her.
Pema came in with another group of visitors in tow, also carrying flowers and packets of rice. Everyone in the room edged up to make space, and Connie thought that she would certainly melt if it got any hotter. She pressed her lips to baby Wayan’s forehead, breathing in the scent of fresh birth. There was an urge inside her to hold the child more closely, feeling his damp skin against her own, but instead she replaced the bundle gently in Dewi’s outstretched hands.
‘I’ll go outside. To make some room,’ she mumbled. Through the thickets of flowers and staring faces she made it into the air. She was sitting on one of the rattan chairs and watching a large black pig, tethered by the leg to a sapling, when Pema came out with one of his sisters behind him. The sister poured green tea into glasses and handed one to Connie and one to Pema. Pema sat down and they sipped their tea while the pig rooted in the ditch and contentedly grunted to itself.
‘You must be proud, Pema,’ Connie said.
He smoothed back his thick hair. He was small but quite good-looking. Before he and Dewi fell in love with each other, Connie had often seen him with a group of his friends, circling on their motorcycles like a flock of two-wheeled birds and eyeing the tourist girls in their shorts and bikini tops.
‘I am. But I am also worried about being responsible.’
Pema was an apprentice mechanic at a small garage on the road that led down to the coast. He would be earning very little money, which was why he and Dewi were living with his parents. Until the two of them could save enough money to buy or build their own house, they would have to stay here among the stepped generations of grandparents and brothers and sisters and the various other babies.
‘That comes with being a father,’ she smiled at him. Pema was a good boy, she thought. He was looking at her in that unspecifically hopeful, speculative way that meant he was wondering if her immense, uncountable Western wealth might somehow be harnessed to his advantage.
‘Do you have children, perhaps?’
‘No,